bank run

This week's newsletter will focus on Europe again as this morning the European summit has produced significant changes in European economic policy. Spanish Prime Minister Rajoy and Italian Prime Minister Monti threatened to 'block…

The Target2 problem is really a manifestation of an accelerating bank run. I have said many times, this is my major concern, the bank runs and the resulting shrinking credit and likely deadweight loss that accompanies them.

As always, I have a lot of links on Monday. Three or four stories have dominated the news in each market for the past week. In the US, it is about either JPMorgan Chase's escalating losses, Facebook's IPO or the general aimlessness of the…

The Spanish banking system is insolvent and the Spanish government simply does not have the wherewithal to clean it up. This is the problem in Spain that has come to a head, particularly now after the rescue of Bankia, Spain's fourth…

The chart below via Reuters' Scott Barber is what an economic depression looks like. It covers Greek bank deposits from 1998 to present.

In February I wrote about the political economy of a Greek default (and euro zone exit), predicting that a Grexit was all but inevitable. In the last few days, there has been an almost feverish debate about this issue, so I wanted to update…

The Greek private sector can generally only rely on the Greek banking system for credit. At the same time the Greek private sector is moving liquidity out of the country, dramatically shrinking the availability of credit.

The following is a March 1932 speech by then US President Herbert Hoover about the growing US deficit. As I indicated in previous posts on Hoover's travails, the President earnestly wanted to balance the budget (see Herbert Hoover: White…

In Paul Krugman’s view, banks are not very important since all they do is to intermediate between savers and investors, taking in deposits and packaging them into loans. Now, I know that Krugman’s own specialty is not money and banking, so…

This was the question put to the ECB's Klaus Masuch by one persistent Irish journalist. The answer from Masuch was a complete dodge, a non-answer, because everyone knows that the Irish government has heaped what rightfully should be…